Lonnie Mack -- Spearfish Lake Tales - Wes Boyd's Message Board

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Subject: Lonnie Mack

Author:
Kirby Lambert

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Date Posted: 16:03:18 04/25/16 Mon

Wes and all:

With all of the news about the death of Prince the loss of another has managed to fall into the cracks.

The guitar hero's guitar hero has passed. Lonnie Mack died this past Thursday April 21 at age 74. Lonnie was the first of the blues-rock guitar soloists and inspired the likes of Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Duane Allman, Bootsy Collins and the great Stevie Ray Vaughan.

SRV played along with Lonnie's recording "Wham" so many times that his father destroyed the record (a 45). SRV promptly went out and bought another copy and went back to practicing. SRV said that he learned to play by listening to Lonnie.

Because of Lonnie's use of a vibrato/tremelo bar on record "Wham" guitarist to this day call it a whammy bar.

I had the great good fortune to be house sound engineer for some of Lonnie's shows in the late 80's early 90's and I will never forget how that felt.

Lonnie's recording "Memphis" reached the top 5 of the charts in 1963 and was awarded a gold record. But Lonnie hated the business of the music business. He was a big old rough cut South Eastern Indiana farm boy who dropped out of school to play music after a fight with a 6th grade teacher.

Lonnie's chubby red neck looks did not go over well against the British Invasion.

His recording of Memphis is classed as number 1 in the list of the top 60 blues-rock recordings ahead of bands like Cream and the Allman Brothers.

As good as his guitar work was I still think that his blue eyed soul recordings were better. I cannot listen to his 1963 recording of "Where There's a Will there's a Way" without tears. He was as good of a hard gospel singer as Archie Brownlee.

Farewell Lonnie my life is better just from your passing through it.

Kirby Lambert

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